The only movie reviews you need

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Like his contemporaries Peter
Jackson and J.J. Abrams, fan-favorite Guillermo del Toro (‘The Devil’s
Backbone,’ ‘Blade 2,’ ‘Hellboy,’ ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘Pacific Rim’) has
established himself as one of the most geektastic filmmakers of our time. Interestingly enough, the Guadalajara native’s
latest feature combined his trademark visual style and panache with the sense
and sensibilities of a Jane Austen novel.An engrossing tale of gothic horror with romance at its heart, ‘Crimson
Peak’ may be del Toro’s best since ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ from a storytelling
standpoint.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged
that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."The wife in this instance is Edith (Mia
Wasikowska), a headstrong young woman and aspiring novelist from Buffalo, New
York at the turn of the 20th Century who’s smitten by the rather
charming Mr. Darcy, by which I mean Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a
baronet from England who may lack "possession of a good fortune" but certainly
not pride and ambition.Against her
wealthy industrialist father’s wishes before his untimely demise, she marries
Sir Thomas and moves to the forbidding and run-down mansion he shares with his enchanting
but mysterious sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), realizing too late that
she’s residing at the very place the ghastly apparitions of her childhood warned her to
beware of, a place called ‘Crimson Peak.’

‘Crimson Peak’ is a story of
elaborate schemes and tragic romance, but it is also a creepy, unsettling and deeply atmospheric
gothic chiller.Del Toro is a master at
building slow-burning suspense, imbuing the movie with a pervasive sense of
dread and impending doom.While the
climactic ending seems a bit rushed, it really can’t be helped once the “cat
is out of the bag.” Del Toro also
deserves much credit for not toning the movie down to a more commercially viable
PG-13 rating, as there are some disturbing images and scenes which made even a
jaded horror fan like me cringe.

The latest collaboration from celebrated
director Steven Spielberg and veteran A-list actor Tom Hanks is the Cold War
melodrama ‘Bridge of Spies,’ which recounts the historical events surrounding
the Francis Gary Powers-for-Rudolf Abel spy swap across the Iron Curtain in
1962.I’m sure you’ve all heard of the infamous U-2
pilot shot down over the Soviet Union while on a top secret reconnaissance mission for the CIA
in 1960, but the behind-the-scenes efforts that brought him back remain a relatively unknown
footnote in our nation's history.

Although ‘Bridge of Spies’ isn’t
the first Hollywood treatment of what is commonly known as the “U-2 Incident” (that
honor belongs to a 1976 TV movie starring “Six Million Dollar Man” Lee Majors,
believe it or not), Spielberg nonetheless crafted a riveting and tightly paced thriller
on a subject as unexciting as a prisoner exchange.He managed to pull it off by providing
unexpected depth and character to the key players of this affair, in particular
James B. Donovan (Hanks) and Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance in a remarkable
performance), the soft-spoken Russian spy arrested by the FBI for espionage in
1957.From the movie's opening scene in
which Abel displayed his well-honed spycraft evading J. Edgar Hoover’s finest
with consummate ease, ‘Bridge of Spies’ pulls the viewer into its intricately
set-up cloak-and-dagger world and never lets go.

More than just a spy movie, BoS
also provides us with a valuable history lesson and a glimpse into the politics
and fears of the pre-Cuban Missile Crisis Cold War era. As the legal counsel assigned to defend
Abel for the sake of formal due process under the law, Hanks’ Donovan is an honorable
and wise man doing a thankless job, not to mention prescient in his prediction
that Abel is much more valuable alive as a potential future bargaining chip (not
surprisingly, his specialty is insurance law).If you have an interest in this period of our nation's history or simply want to see the work of a master director, BoS should not be missed.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Astronaut-in-peril movies make great drama.Since Tom Hanks’s Jim Lovell uttered the famous words “Houston, we have a problem” in Ron Howard’s riveting 1995
cinematic account of the Apollo 13 mission, there has only been one other such
movie, Alfonso Cuarón’s phenomenal multiple Oscar winner ’Gravity’ starring
Sandra Bullock (Reviewed here: http://www.moviesaccordingtodave.blogspot.com/2013/10/houston-were-fucked.html).That is, until now.In ‘The Martian,’ Matt Damon delivered one of
his best performances to date as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist who became stranded on Mars after his fellow Ares 3 crew mates mistook him for dead while evacuating from the Red Planet due to a severe storm.

Adapted from the 2011 bestseller by Andy Weir, ‘The Martian’
is another fine addition to the astronaut-in-peril subgenre.What’s compelling about these movies is that
we get to witness American innovation and ingenuity first-hand in solving challenging
practical engineering problems (like “fitting square pegs into round holes,” to use another
‘Apollo 13’ reference) under extreme life-and-death situations.While the pace of ‘The Martian’ is more
measured than that in ‘Gravity,’ it is in many ways superior to the 2013 seven-time
Oscar winner, thanks largely to Damon’s bravura performance.His Watney is a fascinating character who’s
at once engaging, charismatic, clever, optimistic and full of wry humor, a true
“MacGyver in space” who elicits chuckles from such witty observations as being
the first Mars colonist because he grew crops or a “space pirate” since he’s hijacking
the Ares 4 Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) when international
maritime laws apply.The movie gets away
with “breaking the fourth wall” by having Watney maintain an ongoing video log while speaking directly to the camera in order to chronicle his experiences for
posterity, which provides the audience with a more "personal" viewing experience.

What if we take on the Mexican drug cartels the same way we combat
terrorism?That, in essence, is the
central question director Denis Villeneuve’s ultra-violent and sobering new
crime thriller attempts to answer.With
‘Sicario,’ the relatively unknown French-Canadian director, whose previous
credits include the Hugh Jackman vigilante thriller 'Prisoners' and the Jake Gyllenhaal head-scratcher ‘Enemy,’ just put himself on the
radar as a singular talent to keep an eye on.

After playing Tom Cruise’s training sergeant in the sci-fi
alien invasion flick ‘Edge of Tomorrow,’ British actress Emily Blunt further cemented
her action-heroine creds as Kate Macer, an FBI Special Weapons and Tactics
agent attached to an inter-agency task force headed by the laid-back Matt
Graver (Josh Brolin).Initially
believing that the purpose of this special task force was to surveil and
apprehend a local drug figure with connections to a ruthless Mexican cartel who's responsible for a series of gruesome murders in Arizona, Kate discovered
to her increasing alarm that its scope went far beyond and she may be in over her
head.Adding to her anxiety was the
mysterious Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a Colombian national and “consultant”
on the task force whose role and motives remain somewhat unclear.

Like Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Traffic’ and Oliver Stone’s
‘Savages,’ ‘Sicario’ depicts the “War on Drugs” not in black and white but
shades of grey.It’s not something to be
“won” but rather “managed,” and it is perfectly okay to “fight fire with fire”
so to speak.‘Sicario’ is brilliant
filmmaking because it’s not simply a crime thriller but also a grindhouse revenge
flick and gritty war movie.It’s as if
Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Mann collaborated to make a
movie.Then there’s Benicio del Toro’s
Alejandro, whose quiet demeanor belies a menace just below the surface that’s
resolved perfectly in the film’s climactic final scene.Visceral, cathartic, gripping, suspenseful and
thought-provoking, ‘Sicario’ is by far the best movie on the “War on Drugs” to
date because it literally depicts it as one.